“Texas is Hotter Than the Hottest Place on Earth.” Come on. Is this click bait or what? When Newsweek published this headline last month, I thought to myself, “prove it.”
So, yeah, California’s Death Valley is technically known as the hottest place on Earth and certainly the driest place in North America. And on one horrible day in May, when meteorologists were forecasting a “real feel” heat index of 112 degrees in south central Texas, it’s true that – for one day only – our region was hotter than Death Valley.
But is this a trend? It’s safe to say we’re in an era of extreme weather events. Flood plain maps are being redrawn as Houstonians come to the dawning realization that we must learn to live with water, and we’re noticeably nervous about the grid crashing either because we’re all running our air conditioners simultaneously in the summer or trying to stay warm, similar to 2021’s Winter Storm Uri.
We checked in with Nicholas B. Suntzeff, Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, the University Distinguished Professor & Regents Professor of the Texas A&M University System and the Mitchell/Heep/Munnerlyn Chair in Astronomy at the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
He tells us that, “There’s no doubt the Earth is warming up.” Suntzeff, with deep roots in physics and astronomy, recounts how Tucson, Arizona weather forecasters engage in an annual contest trying to predict the first day of the year when temperatures hit 100 degrees.
“They call it the ice breaking,” says Suntzeff. “That first day has marched up earlier and earlier each year. This May was incredibly hot.”
The Sun’s luminosity, or brightness, has been steadily increasing since its birth. Over the next billion years, it’s predicted that it will become about 10 percent brighter. The sun would literally become a death star.
“There are things we can do. One is to send up reflectors into orbit around the earth,” suggests Suntzeff. “We could launch ballistic rockets, like bullets, into higher orbit and you spread out mylar sheets. The estimate about ten years ago was a couple of trillion dollars.
“When you’re faced with an apocalypse a few trillion dollars is a small amount to spend,” Suntzeff says.
“Another thing to do is send up rockets into the atmosphere and dump dust, like sulphur particles. We know that when a volcano erupts, like Krakatoa, it will create a cooling effect. There are other cities that are actually cooler because the air pollution deflects the sun.”
We know from solarology that the sun shines because of hydrogen fusion. Protons inside the core of the sun fuse together and are turned into helium, resulting in a release of energy that keeps the sun hot. That energy radiates out from the sun and moves across the solar system. The impressive power of the sun is to be admired and feared.
“It will be really important for Earth, as the Sun gets brighter and brighter. The increase of the luminosity of the sun, even if it’s one percent, will destroy all life on earth. We only may have half a billion years before the sun completely changes life on Earth,” says Suntzeff.
But the professor doesn’t rule out other, more imminent, apocalyptic events. “One is the possibility of an asteroid hitting the Earth. Around 66 million years ago an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs,” says Suntzeff. “It hit the Earth and the dust reflected the sunlight.
“We don’t have the technology at this point to deflect an asteroid,” he adds.
“The other threat is the solar flare of the sun. Sunspots appear and disappear. They have a significant effect on the weather of the earth.
“The sun has not had a super flare for a long time. It would bring down the electrical grids, GPS would not work, the super flare would destroy civilization. We don’t know how often those happen. We do know that there have been significantly greater flares over the past 100 years. Solar astronomers study the evolution of stars. The flares themselves are formed by magnetic fields, it’s not completely understood at this point,” adds Suntzeff.
According to solar scientists, the sun continues to expand by documented rates. A few centimeters a year doesn’t seem like much but, in the world of solar science, if the expansion was to accelerate, twenty-first century technology would give us little protection.
What would it take to flee to much cooler points on Earth: burrow into the ground or go live beneath the ocean? The heat monster has arrived in Texas and along with drought I am expecting a brutal summer.
